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July 11 - August 24, 2021
“When I am not working, I must relax—not work on something else!” —Psychologist B. F. Skinner, reflecting on a crucial realization that became a turning point in his career5
Emotions that goad you by saying, “Just do it, it feels right,” can be misleading in other ways. In choosing your career, for example, “Follow your passion” may be like deciding to marry your favorite movie star. It sounds great until reality rears its head.
Over the past decades, students who have blindly followed their passion, without rational analysis of whether their choice of career truly was wise, have been more unhappy with their job choices than those who coupled passion with rationality.
We develop a passion for what we are good at. The mistake is thinking that if we aren’t good at something, we do not have and can never develop a passion for it.
Accomplishing a lot of difficult tasks is like eating a salami. You go slice by slice—bit by bit. Cheer every accomplishment, even the tiniest ones. You’re moving ahead!
It’s worth reemphasizing that world-class experts in a variety of disciplines reveal that their path to expertise wasn’t easy. They slogged through some tedious, difficult times to get to their current level of expertise where they can glide by and make it all look easy.
See Joshua Foer’s masterful TED talk for a demonstration of the memory palace technique for remembering speeches.
If you’d like to see how to apply these ideas directly to memorizing formulas, try out the SkillsToolbox .com website for a list of easy-to-remember visuals for mathematical symbols.7 (For example, the divide symbol “/” is a children’s slide.)
Incidentally, the little book Calculus Made Easy, by Silvanus Thompson, has helped generations of students master the subject.
Remember—people learn by trying to make sense out of information they perceive. They rarely learn anything complex simply by having someone else tell it to them. (As math teachers say, “Math is not a spectator sport.”)
It is the practice—particularly deliberate practice on the toughest aspects of the material—that can help lift average brains into the realm of those with more “natural” gifts.
As Albert Einstein noted, “There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as if everything is.”
Regardless of your current or intended career path, keep your mind open and ensure that math and science are in your learning repertoire.
Persistence is often more important than intelligence.
“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool.”
Friends and teammates can serve as a sort of ever-questioning, larger-scale diffuse mode, outside your own brain, that can catch what you missed, or what you just can’t see. And of course, as mentioned earlier, explaining to friends helps build your own understanding.
Another technique involves mindfulness.5 In this technique, you learn to distinguish between a naturally arising thought (I have a big test next week) and an emotional projection that can tag along after that initial thought (If I flunk the test, I will wash out of the program, and I’m not sure what I’ll do then!).
Reshaping your brain is under your control. The key is patient persistence—working knowledgeably with your brain’s strengths and weaknesses.
A central theme of this book is the paradoxical nature of learning.
